When Safeena Husain looks back at her childhood, the story of Educate Girls does not begin in a village classroom or an NGO office. It begins in Delhi, in her childhood, which she describes as “very turbulent” and when her own education came to a halt.
Speaking at fireside chat at businessline Changemaker Awards 2026 with Richa Mishra, Resident Editor, Hyderabad, Husain, founder of Educate Girls and a businessline Changemaker awardee herself, said she grew up in difficult neighbourhoods of Delhi such as Paharganj, Nauroji Nagar and Saket. It was not a childhood marked by privilege, she said, adding that Delhi was a difficult place to grow up in those years.
Her education was interrupted for several years. While others moved ahead to college, Husain found herself being described as the girl who was “not doing anything”. The advice from the neighbourhood was familiar: get her married and settle her down.
Eventually, Husain got the opportunity go to the London School of Economics, the first person in her family to go overseas. “It changed my life,” she recalled.
Years later, that experience would become the foundation of an organisation that has worked to bring girls who have never enrolled in school, dropped out or experienced interruptions in education back into learning.
‘My everything’
Husain’s first instinct was not to start an NGO. After LSE, she moved to San Francisco and began her development-sector career after spending about nine months in Silicon Valley. She went on to work in community health in Ecuador, Mexico, Bolivia and South Africa, including with indigenous communities in the Amazon and Oaxaca, Mexico.
The turning point came when she was setting up a clinic in the mountains between Dehradun and Mussoorie, back in India.
Proud of the work she was doing, Husain invited her father to see the clinic. Villagers gathered around him and began asking questions about his family. When he said Hussain was his only child, his only daughter, the mood changed. There was silence, she recalled. The women around him appeared almost mournful. They told him he was still young and should remarry and “try again” for a son.
Her father simply put his arm around her and said: “This is my son, this is my daughter, this is my everything.”
The prejudice exists
For Husain, however, the moment was about the girls who could not simply leave the village. “My father and I can,” she remembered thinking. “But what about all the girls who are there?”
In villages, she still encounters the attitude that treats a girl as a liability and an animal as an asset. Investing in a daughter, she said, can be viewed as “watering a neighbour’s garden”. But Husain is careful not to place the problem solely at the doors of rural India.
The prejudice, she argued, exists across society, albeit in different degrees. “Patriarchy stains us all,” she said, describing it as a mindset that people have to unlearn rather than a problem belonging only to a particular community.
Published on September 22, 2026
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